Category: Book Review

Book Review: ‘Return to Enceladus’ by Brandon Q. Morris.

Anyone who has been reading my reviews of Science Fiction novels will surely have noticed a certain trend of late. I am getting rather tired of interesting ideas that produce a really good single novel being turned into an entire series of books. The second book in a series may still be worth reading but it will certainly be inferior to the first. And the quality of the stories really decreases after that.

Author Brandon Q. Morris. (Credit: Mal Warwick on Books)

A case in point is the ‘Ice Worlds’ series by the author Brandon Q. Morris. The first novel ‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good hard SF story about an unmanned probe discovering signs of life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A manned expedition aboard the space ship ILSE (which stands for International Life Search Expedition) is sent to both confirm the discovery and learn more about the life forms.

Cover of ‘Return to Enceladus’ by Brandon Q. Morris. (Credit: Amazon.com)

The description of ILSE was quite realistic and the entity on Enceladus was both different and intriguing, it was sort of one of those ‘group mind’ aliens that appear in some SF novels. All in all ‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good book that I still recommend.

‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good ‘hard SF’ novel with an interesting alien. (Credit: Audible.com)

The second novel ‘The Titan Probe’ also wasn’t bad. With the ILSE and her crew already at Enceladus the idea of them taking a little side trip to Saturn’s biggest moon Titan made sense and again the life form that they found there, if not as well described as the one on Enceladus, was at least interesting and different. One part of ‘The Titan Probe’ needs to be mentioned. During the story, one of the ILSE crew, the ship’s doctor Marchenko sacrifices himself to save several other crew members but his consciousness is implanted on the ship’s computer by the entity on Enceladus.

The possibility of life on Enceladus has engineers and scientists at NASA already planning for a mission to probe beneath the icy crust of the moon of Saturn. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)

The third novel ‘The Io Encounter’ was a real disappointment. The crew of ILSE are on their way back to Earth when they’re ordered to stop off at Jupiter’s moon Io. Again signs of life have been found there. And while most of the crew are on Io’s surface the ILSE turns back toward Enceladus only to stop halfway there and return to Io!

Jupiter’s moon Io is squeezed and stretched by the immense gravity of Jupiter. This makes Io the most geologically active body in out solar system and hardly a place to find life. (Credit: Astronoo)

All this is completely unrealistic; space missions are planned out years in advance and are simply not equipped for any major changes in trajectory. Having actually calculated a couple of, admittedly rough, space missions I know very well how a side trip another planet is rarely possible. Jupiter could be on the other side of the solar system from Saturn for example, and such changes in the mission would require double the amount of fuel if not much more. In fact the delta Vee needed to go into orbit around Jupiter is really enormous. What had started as a believable SF story had become little more than a cartoon where the laws of physics are ignored. Worse yet, the quality of the story had also suffered.

The starship Enterprise may be able to change course for a new destination at the orders of Captain Kirk but real spaceships require years of planning to accomplish their missions. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

The fourth novel ‘Return to Enceladus’ is no better. The crew of ILSE are back home on Earth where they get a proposal from an eccentric Russian billionaire who wants them to go back to Enceladus. He is making money by mining near Earth asteroids and is looking to expand his business to the outer solar system. The crew’s reason for going back would be to retrieve the body of their dead comrade Marchenko so that his consciousness can be reinstalled; no description of how this will be done is ever given.

The idea of mining an asteroid has become a common idea in SF stories. It’s probably going to be harder than most people think. (Credit: ExplainingTheFuture.com)

Problem is that the ILSE has been left on a course that will take it to be destroyed in the Sun so the first thing the crew, now joined by the Russian’s daughter, have to do is take one of his ships to rendezvous with the ILSE and stop it from plunging into the Sun. Once on board they set course for Saturn, no mention is made as to how the ship is refueled or resupplied with enough food for a two-year mission.

The idea of downloading a human consciousness onto a computer is also quite old an old one. (Credit: Live Science)

At this point the story becomes a mystery novel as several attempts are made on the lives of different crewpersons and the mission itself. Actually the guilty party is pretty obvious from the start but the crime plot still it takes up half the novel. And when we finally get back to Enceladus the entity there has gone into hiding, it’s now afraid of us, so we don’t even learn more about it.

I have to admit I’m not a fan of murder mysteries in general and adding one to a SF novel is just not a good idea. (Credit: Illinois River Road)

Anyway the whole trip wasn’t worth it in my opinion. The ‘Ice Words’ series by Brandon Q. Morris is just another series of novels that starts out as being fresh and interesting but by the end has just simply run out of steam. ‘Return to Enceladus’ just isn’t a very good SF novel.

Book Review: ‘The Riddle of Resurrection’ by Tryggven D. Mettinger.

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain,” wrote Ben Franklin, “except death and taxes.” Putting aside taxes it is undeniable that death is the final end for each and every one of us in this world. Or is it? Many people believe in ghosts and stories abound of ‘undead’ creatures such as vampires and zombies. However generally such beings are believed to have died but not yet left this world.

The Ghost of Barbara Radziwitt by Wojciech Gerson. Despite thousands of ghost stories dating back thousands of years there is no reliable evidence for anyone coming back from the dead! (Credit: Wikipedia)

At the same time the mythologies of many cultures also contain stories about heroes or demigods who have entered the underworld and returned. In Greek legends both Orpheus and Odysseus descend to Hades while alive and manage to return. Other figures in other cultures make similar journeys.

Not all versions of the Orpheus myth are serious, Jacques Offenbach turned the story into a risque operetta for which he invented the dance the Can-Can. (Credit: Twitter)

About a hundred and thirty years ago the anthropologist Sir James Frazier collected and analyzed an enormous amount of mythological material from dozens of different cultures. In 1890 he published the first edition in a series of volumes he entitled “The Golden Bough” detailing the results of his studies. I have a copy of the abridged edition, abridged at 827 pages so the entire work is enormous! Sometimes considered the foundation of the study of comparative religion, ‘The Golden Bough’ has always been a very controversial book.

Cover of the third edition, first volume of Farzier’s ‘Golden Bough’ (Credit: The List)
Frazier got his title from a painting by William Turner that shows an ancient Roman ritual Frazier used as a starting point for his investigations. (Credit: Arnold Arboretum)

Much of the controversy arose due to Frazier’s definition of a class of deities that he called ‘The Dying and Resurrecting Vegetative Gods’. The basic story for each of these gods contained a violent death of the god that led to a descent to the underworld that was then followed by a return to life for the god. This motif, Frazier maintained, was a mythologized version of the yearly cycle of agriculture with the grain being cut down at harvest, then seeds are planted, then buried from which new plants will sprout. Thus the stories explained the yearly course of the seasons and since the stories are all cyclical you can of course start anywhere in the cycle and still get back to where you started.

Actually the evidence about any of these figures is scant and contradictory. (Credit: Elpidio Valdes)

The worship of these gods featured a period of morning for the god’s death at the end of harvest time, whenever harvest time occurred in a particular culture, along with a festival of rejoicing for the god’s resurrection when the first sprouts appeared. Frazier identified quite a few gods that he thought belonged to this group including well-known deities such as Adonis, Osiris and the Norse Balder along with many lesser-known mythological figures. The earliest, and therefore the type specimen for the group was a Sumerian god called Dumuzi who is also known by the name Tammuz given to him in the Hebrew scripture.

The Shepard Dumuzi (r) was the consort of Inanna (l) the Goddess of the Moon. At the end of the story Dumuzi spends half the year in the Underworld and half in the natural world. (Credit: Pinterest)

The whole idea of ‘dying and resurrecting corn gods’ was quite controversial but Frazier went further by linking them directly to the Christian Jesus. So dangerous were Frazier’s ideas that in the years following his death a reaction set in with many scholars criticizing Frazier’s entire category. The critics were aided by the archaeological discovery of the final chapter of the Dumuzi myth at a dig in Iraq, which was translated and first published in 1951. You see the first discovered cuneiform tablets to contain the Dumuzi story were missing the conclusion and to be honest Frazier had merely constructed an ending based on his study of other myths.

When the actual ending was discovered it bore little resemblance to Frazier’s ideas and this, along with other inaccuracies in Frazier’s work led to the category of ‘dying and resurrecting corn gods’ falling into disfavour. Still there was just so much evidence in both myths and rituals that the concept refused to go away.

The Greek demigod Adonis (r) bears many resemblances to Dumuzi. He is the consort of Aphrodite (l), he dies a violent death and is brought back to life by his beloved. (Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art and the artist Titian)

‘The Riddle of Resurrection’ by Tryggven D. Mettinger, Professor of the Hebrew bible at Lund University in Sweden, is a recent attempt to cut through all of the noise and just answer the question, is their even such a class of mythological figures as ‘dying and resurrecting gods’ that can be studied. Unlike Frazier, whose work examined scores of gods from cultures around the World, Professor Mettinger concentrates on just a few mythological figures from the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, primarily Adonis, Dumuzi-Tammuz, Osiris, along with the Semitic gods Baal and Melqart. In this way Professor Mettinger can examine the latest evidence for the myths and rituals concerning each deity. Also unlike Frazier, who at times would leap back and forth with evidence from Babylon to the Norse Eddas to ancient Sanskrit, Professor Mettinger sticks to one subject at a time making it much easier to follow his arguments.

Cover of ‘The Riddle of Resurrection’ by Tryggven Mettinger. (Credit: Amazon)

Mettinger also examines the evidence much more critically than Frazier did, at times even discussing the differing translations of critical words found in ancient texts. This makes ‘The Riddle of Resurrection’ a more technically demanding book, it is written primarily for experts in the field, but it also provides greater confidence in Professor Mettinger’s conclusions.

‘The Rape of Persephone’ by Charles Antoine Coypel. Persephone is the dying and resurrecting goddess who is carried down to the underworld by Hades and spends half the year with him the other half with her mother Ceres making plants grow! (Credit: Pictorem.com)

I do have a few criticisms of ‘The Riddle of Resurrection’, most notably the lack of a more thorough treatment of Persephone, the best known ‘dying and resurrecting goddess’. While the Greek queen of the underworld is mentioned several times in the book her myth not only deserves more examination but it could help to illuminate the latest understanding of Dumuzi’s fate. At the same time Mettinger also pretty much ignores the completely human characters in mythology who journey to the underworld and return, like Orpheus and Odysseus. In his conclusions Professor Mettinger decides that the category of ‘dying and resurrection gods’ is a valid one, one worthy of study. And if you’re interested in mythology and ancient cultures, in the way that old beliefs have evolved into our current religions then you’ll certainly find ‘The Riddle of Resurrection’ to be worth reading.  

Book Review: The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays, by Arthur George.

Let’s be honest, we humans like to celebrate, we like to have a good time and we’re always looking for a reason, any reason to party. Now some of the reasons we celebrate are quite personal, it’s my birthday or it’s our wedding anniversary. Others are special for a small group of people; perhaps your bowling team just won the league championship. And of course there are the special days set aside every year for an entire population, either national or religious, to come together as a community and reaffirm the bonds that they all share. Those days are called holidays and some of them are historical in nature while others are our way of marking the changes in the seasons as we go through the year. Both kinds of holidays do have one thing in common however, we have mythologized them to the extent that sometimes it is difficult to decide where reality ends and mythmaking begins.

Let’s be honest, we humans will take any excuse to celebrate! (Credit: Pinterest)

That’s where ‘The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays’ by Arthur George comes in. Starting, as our year does, with the celebrations for New Year’s Day Mr. George examines Groundhog’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Carnival or Mardi Gras, Easter, May Day, Independence Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving before finally concluding with Christmas.

Cover of ‘The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays’ by Arthur George. (Credit: Target)

For each holiday in turn Mr. George follows basically the same methodology, beginning with the origins of each holiday. The ancient festivals of Greco-Roman, Celtic, Hebrew and Germanic cultures are scrutinized, as is early American history. The festivals of these cultures provide the clues as to why a particular American holiday exists in the first place along with why it is celebrated at the time of year that it is. Following the growth of each holiday from its roots to the present day Mr. George then goes on to highlight how the various rituals associated with each developed.

The Classical Romans liked to enjoy themselves and celebrated many holidays both private and public. (Credit: Nova Roma)
The ancient Gaels (Irish) celebrated the end of the year at Samhain (Sow-Ween) which today we continue to celebrate as Halloween. (Credit: Reuters)

Of course many, perhaps most of our holidays are rooted in nature. The renewal of life every spring along with the end of the growing season in the fall are obvious examples but Mr. George shows in detail how even Groundhog’s day and May Day have for thousands of years been observed in connection with the yearly cycle of the Earth. At the same time other holidays, more political in nature still tend acquire features over time that relate to the time of year in which they occur, a picnic or baseball game on the 4th of July for instance.

The Maypole has been used to celebrate the beginning of new life at spring for thousands of years. (Credit: Omilights)

While the mythology surrounding religious festivals is well recognized Mr. George also succeeds in illustrating the legends associated with our secular holidays as well. From the figure of Lady Liberty to the fact that the phrase ‘The First Thanksgiving’ was only coined some 200 years after the event it was used to describe Mr. George clearly shows how we humans like to embroider the truth around those days we consider important.

Out Lady Liberty is actually MUCH older than the USA. She has a clear relation to the Roman Goddess Libertas. (Credit: Ancient Pages)

More than that however, Mister George also delves into the psychological aspects of our holidays. In the book he also investigates the emotional benefits we humans derive from celebrating the renewal of vegetation in the spring or the shortest day of the year, December 25th. In ancient Rome, the Winter Solstice was known as the ‘Birthday of the Sun’, which of course eventually became Christmas, the birthday of the son of god.

December 25th was also the birthday of the Persian God Mithra whose worship spread throughout the Roman world in the years just before Christianity gained control. (Credit: Britannica)

I do have two very small complaints about “The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays’. One is that on several occasions Mister George limits himself with only covering the highlights of how a particular holiday developed. The reader often gets a distinct feeling that he could say a lot more if he wanted. At the same time the narrow focus on American holidays is quite arbitrary, comparisons to modern holidays in other countries are completely absent. I think that both problems stem from Mr. George’s desire to prevent the size of the book from getting too large, which books on mythology often do.

People in other parts of the World like to celebrate just as much as Americans. Mr. George could have spent a bit of time discussing those holidays. (Credit: Afro Tourism)

Nevertheless ‘The Mythology of America’s Seasonal Holidays’ is both an interesting and enjoyable book. If you want a better understanding of how much of our national culture began and grew, Mr. George’s book belongs in your library.

Book Review: ‘Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, a Recent History’ by Kurt Anderson.

 Forty years ago the United States was in the midst of a contentious presidential election. The incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter was being challenged by Republican B-grade movie actor turned politician Ronald Reagan.

Even at the time America could sense the political shift that Reagan’s defeat of then President Carter entailed but after 40 years the true extent of the damage is only now becoming clear. (Credit: Snopes.com)

Carter was widely viewed as a kind and gentle but weak leader who was unable to solve the country’s many problems. And America had a lot of problems back then. Not only was the economy sluggish, with low growth and very high interest rates but thanks to the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal the average American’s trust in their government was at an all time low.

Reagan promised a new vision for the country. Government was the problem he asserted. His plan was to lower taxes, especially on the wealthy, and shrink the size of government. With their increased wealth the rich would invest more in the economy he told voters.  With all of that new investment the economy would grow at a faster rate than even during prosperous times of the 50s and 60s. The economy would grow so fast he assured us that before long the benefits would ‘Trickle Down’ to everyone so that ‘A rising tide would raise all boats’.

How Trickle Down economics was supposed to work. (Credit: Economics Help)

With his fatherly, show business personality Reagan easily won the 1980 election and proceeded to turn his agenda into policy. Since Reagan’s presidency that mantra of ‘Lower Taxes’ and ‘Shrink the Government’ has been gospel for the Republican Party, an act of faith without any evidence to support it. As the rich get richer, they still promise, the wealth will someday trickle down.

After 40 years how it actually feels like Trickle Down economics works. (Credit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Regulations were another target; they just got in the way of Big Business making America a wealthier nation. Get rid of all of that anti-trust, anti-financial, pro-environment government meddling. The ‘Invisible Hand’ of a ‘Free Market’ would solve all of America’s problems.

Again, how the Invisible Hand is supposed to work. (Credit: Market Business News)

Well over the next forty years the rich certainly got richer, the rest of us are still waiting for the trickle to start. In fact while the real wealth of the top 1% of Americans has quadrupled the wealth of the middle 50% has remained virtually the same and the wealth of the lowest quarter of Americans has actually fallen by about a third.

Since Reagan’s time the Invisible Hand has lifted the wealth of the top 1% by quite a lot. The bottom 50%, not so much! (Credit: Vox)

‘Evil Geniuses, the Unmaking of America, a Recent History’ by journalist Kurt Anderson is the story of how the people of the United States were duped into accepting a flawed, indeed a dangerous economic plan. It’s the story of how in the 60s a few ultra-conservative, New Deal hating politicians and economists began to build a movement that in the 80s not only dominated the Republican Party but received the tacit consent of many Democrats.

Cover of ‘Evil Geniuses’ by Kurt Anderson. (Credit: Amazon)
Author and Journalist Kurt Anderson. (Credit: The Village Vioce)

But the conservative movement in the US was about more than just the economy. The ‘Free Market’ conservatives not only co-opted the support of the ‘Moral Majority’ religious right but even bargained with the racist, anti-immigrant hate mongers in America for their support. This latter accommodation with the old white supremacists was started by none other than Richard Nixon as his ‘Southern Strategy’.

Senator Strom Thurmond was one of many segregationist Democrats who switched to the Republican party in opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

In ‘Evil Geniuses’ Kurt Anderson gives you all of the details of that monumental con game and even more importantly makes all of the connections. You’ll discover how the Koch brothers and other millionaires used their huge fortunes to fund conservative think tanks and endow university professorships with the sole intention of providing intellectual justification for their wholesale theft of the wealth of America. You’ll learn about how Roger Ailes, before creating the ‘fair and balanced’ FOX News was executive producer for Russ Limbaugh. Together the two demonstrated how to turn anger and hatred into entertainment, politics as show business laying out the path that would eventually lead to the ultimate hate monger Donald Trump.

Roger Alies (l) helped create right wing hate media with Rush Limbaugh (r). Today it has devolved into Breitbart, One America Network and even such underground conspiracies as Qanon. (Credit: YouTube)

There are far too many details to mention here, too many connections between the principal players; you’ll just have to read “Evil Geniuses’ to get the whole story. As Kurt Anderson himself says several times the story reads almost like a conspiracy theory except that, with the exception of a few individuals like the Koch brothers, all of the conspiring was done in public, there was virtually no attempt made to hide anything. Several times Mister Anderson points to the character of Gordon Gekko in the movie ‘Wall Street’ claiming that ‘Greed is Good’ as an example of the brazen economic immorality that has dominated right wing politics for the last 40 years.

Actor Michael Douglas as Wall Street executive Gordon Gekko. The unfortunate thing is that there are literally thousands of ‘businessmen’ who look upon Gekko as a role model.

I do have a few small criticisms of ‘Evil Geniuses’ however. For one thing Mister Anderson needs to learn how to present data in either graph or table form. Throughout ‘Evil Geniuses’ we are giving a good deal of statistics about GDP or unemployment or income inequality exclusively in prose form, not the easiest way to absorb a large number of facts. I know that Mister Anderson is a magazine writer and editor not a scientist, but he must know some science journalists who could give him a few pointers on how to use graphs and tables.

Let me give one example. Anderson discusses a survey where people in the US are shown pie charts illustrating the wealth breakdown in two countries, i.e. how much the top 1% own, the next 10% own on down to the people at the bottom. The people surveyed aren’t told which countries are represented, they are in fact the US and Sweden, and are asked, based on the information from the graphs only, which country they would rather live in. Of course more than 90% chose Sweden. Well I think that the point could have been made more effectively if the pie graphs themselves had been shown! If Anderson had access to the survey’s results he could have gotten access to the pie graphs and just shown them! Really, in my opinion a dozen or so graphs or tables would have greatly improved the punch of ‘Evil Geniuses’.

See how much better it is to show data rather than try to talk about it! A picture is worth a thousand words after all. (Credit: Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility)

 Other than that I give my highest approval to ‘Evil Geniuses’ by Kurt Anderson. It is without doubt an important and well researched book in these trying times for our country. In addition to being important however it also succeeds in being an absorbing, enjoyable book, a combination not at all easy to accomplish.